Religious diversity mandates secular government

I wouldn’t know. I do know that I want our government to remain as our founders created it: secular. That’s the only way religious freedom can prevail.

Killion challenges me “to provide evidence from our national origins that stopping life in the womb is a civil right.” It’s one of the pre-existing rights covered by the Ninth Amendment and buttressed by the Fourteenth. See the Roe vs. Wade decision. Note, however, other rights, such as the right to marry inter-racially and women’s suffrage, aren’t from our national origins.

Killion also challenges me to refute the historical evidence of the Library of Congress’ Religion exhibit. It doesn’t need refutation; it just needs context. I recommend the following Library of Congress American History exhibit segments: “American Revolution” and “The New Nation 1785-1815.” There, you’ll see the words of George Washington, Ben Franklin, James Madison, John Adams and Thomas Jefferson. Neither Christian nor deist, they took the best that the Enlightenment had to offer, bringing a unique synergism to our Founders’ effort to create our nation.

Time to consider a change of direction

This may be the time to consider a change of direction for law enforcement in the city of Escondido. With recent developments involving the chief and its lack of transparency, as well as several missteps involving major investigations such as the Crowe case, the Amber Dubois case and others, contracting with the sheriff’s department may be a viable option.

Let’s face it, if it’s good enough for our many surrounding cities, it certainly should work for the city of Escondido. Some advantages are the many resources available from the sheriff’s department (manpower, crime lab, training etc.) that smaller cities just don’t have the ability to provide in a timely manner for not only major criminal investigations, but daily policing. Also, the need to have continuity policing these cities.

A feasibility study conducted by public officials and citizens from the community may benefit the city in the long term.

This is, by no means, an indictment of the hardworking men and women who make up the rank and file of the Escondido Police Department. Their careers should be a major consideration in any decision.

Will Bayles

Escondido

Letting his voice be heard

I live in Seven Oaks, an over-55 community. There are about 1,700 residences. I’m sure each one uses dry-cell batteries, which incidentally, drop dead.

How to dispose of them, per the law? There are no convenient recycle bins in or around Seven Oaks, old folks mainly being limited in their travel distances. Foolishly, I believed in the malarkey that is perpetuated by the political class and their toadies, that your voice has to be heard about sometimes mundane concerns.

So, I communicated this act to my newest San Diego District 5 Councilman, his name currently escapes me at this time. Of course, no reply or acknowledgment. I also imagine this, plus the mercury bulb situation, is a citywide conundrum.

So, while the exalted leaders daily plot to foist off on the hapless citizens plans for a “downtown stadium,” a horror in the making, a main library that has become the center of homeless invasion, a new mayor who wants to become a fearless and tireless visionary for the city, we the great unwashed who are beginning to doubt the claptrap spewed forth by those who wish to enhance their bottom line, are once again bombarded with, “Let your voices be heard, good citizen.”

Bob O’Dwyer

Rancho Bernardo

Abuse of powers

Will someone please take the crayons away from the man-child in the White House, along with his pad of blank executive orders?

Executive orders should be like lucky wishes: You only get three and you can’t use one to wish for more executive orders.

Barack Hussein Obama is becoming increasingly dangerous and the conservative representatives appear to be silent. It’s like living in a country with one political party, and that governing party is not of my choosing.

As far as I am concerned, he should have never been allowed to apply for this job in the first place, let alone get re-elected. He is a wizard at avoiding accountability, while the media creates stories to serve as distractions. He should be thoroughly investigated, impeached and deported before it is too late.

I like my country just the way it was, and for this guy to come along and announce he intends to fundamentally change it is like me going into your house and rearranging your furniture.

Maybe some people look to the government for answers. I don’t, and I don’t want the government to tell me how to live my life.

Richard Moker

Valley Center

Obama doesn’t care

I find it very interesting that the whiners are now complaining their take-home pay is less because of the raise in taxes. Where were they on Election Day? They voted for President Obama, who promised to raise their taxes, and he kept his word and it is the only time he ever did in four years.

Mr. Obama, as the saying goes, “ain’t done yet.” As we drown in debt, he blithely flew back to Hawaii on Air Force One at our great expense to hit a few golf balls after he signed the fiscal bill.

The best is yet to come, or, should I say, worst? May I suggest that Mr. Obama read the Constitution? He might learn something about what the government can and cannot do. Then again, he has proved he really doesn’t care.

Phil Epstein

Carlsbad

Our secular, humanistic republic

It comes as no surprise when “fundies” confuse mythology for history. After all, religion is just the business end of superstition, and in superstition, there is no room for facts or logic.

But the latest letter from Howard Killion (“Secularists undermine our democratic foundation,” Jan. 10) is so wrong, it cries out for righting.

Killion claims that the first of the “Great Awakenings” in the mid-1700s provided the set and setting for the American Revolution and subsequent development of democracy; nothing could be farther from the truth. The American Revolution and the founding fathers were very much products of the Enlightenment, and the Enlightenment was a conscious disengagement from the oppressive and destructive role of religion in western politics.

Throughout the middle ages, the church attempted to impose theocratic rule in Europe, and after the Protestant Reformation, that effort became even more cruel and violent, culminating in the devastation of the Thirty Years’ War (1618 to 1648).

Religious fanaticism had such a corrupting and destructive influence that Western culture rejected theocracy, resulting in what we call the Enlightenment.

If you love your freedom, thank a secular humanist.

Gerold Firl

Poway

Christian values?

Maury Carpenter’s vitriolic letter of Jan. 8 (“Attack on religion”) accuses President Obama of masterminding every skullduggerous conspiracy and of being just short of the anti-Christ.

Carpenter’s allusions to so-called Christian values need to be clarified by the fact that Jesus was the original sword-wielding (Matthew 10:34, Luke 12:49-53), socialist-communist (Luke 14:33, 18:22, 18:25).

Over the centuries, it has been Christian values that brought us the Inquisition, the Holocaust, the Native American genocide, slavery, child sexual abuse and misogynistic attitudes that exist to this day.

What part of ‘global’ is not understood?

I expect that if he were in Australia, which is being ravaged by brush fires and experiencing record high temperatures, he would consider the theory to have been proved beyond doubt.

It is not, however, the conditions where Mr. Waterhouse happens to be at any particular time that prove or disprove the theory, but the worldwide trend over many years. I mean, what part of “global” doesn’t Mr. Waterhouse understand?

The current cold snap might make Mr. Waterhouse roll his eyes at the mention of global warming, but it is letters like his that make me roll my eyes.